The key word is indulgent

I'd like to recommend never going anywhere near Braid, but I can't as I don't know if it's crap. The vast majority of the internet thinks that it's the greatest game ever, so I'm forced to concede through force of numbers that it must be a good game.

So all I can to do is analyze why I suffered such a massive allergic reaction to it.

1. I approached it looking for faults.

2. I started at three in the morning, perfectly sober, when ideally I should have started it late in the evening, quite drunk.

3. Braid tries really hard to be arty, and thus I responded to it in the same way I do to quite a lot of art i.e. derision and disgust. I don't like to be jerked about too much when it comes to narrative, yet Braid is indulgently obscure. Fragments of story are revealed in chronologically mismatched and unavoidable chunks of text segregated away from the rest of the game at the beginning of every level, which read like teenage poetry and convey the general feeling that the writer, Mr Johnathan Blow, thinks he has an idea for a story so great that he refuses to share it with anybody, but wants everybody to know how great the thing he isn't telling them is.

Or he believes there's something inherently deep and mysterious about failing to tell a story.

IT'S NOT HARD TO FAIL TO TELL A STORY.

Fortunately, it turns out that all this text has little-to-nothing to do with the main plot anyway (a simple story of a man searching for a princess), and merely serves as filler until the final act's twist, where the truth is shockingly revealed - [SPOILER] that you are a mentally-unbalanced stalker rapist nuclear scientist and the princess is a nuclear bomb. Or something.[/SPOILER]

Which is garbage.

There's nothing wrong with ambiguous endings but it's clearly just pure garbage. A garbage ending built on a garbage middle and garbage start. You can try to interpret some sense into the garbage but ultimately you won't get anything more out of it than what you put in, and frankly you shouldn't be doing the author's job for him.

It's such a shame that the knobby pretentiousness drags down the reasonable time-manipulation puzzles, especially as I spent ten pounds on the flipping thing.

Also, any comparisons to Portal are completely unfounded. While Portal takes a simple, new concept and has a lot of fun with it, Braid takes an ancient time-control mechanic and then confounds the player by massively complicating it with arbitrary, fiddly rules. The only similarity between the two games is their short length, which in Braid's case is a blessing.

I'm pretty tired and miffed so I apologize if this post doesn't make a lot of sense. Also for the swearing.